After much deliberation, patching, etc it has been decided that the best way forward for Open Game Art is a site upgrade and redesign. A lot of the modules and otherwise that OGA has used over the years are quite long in the tooth or no longer supported making upgrades and fixing issues increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, OGA is running by a team of volunteers and the current developers of the site are unable to accomplish this by themselves in a reasonable time frame as the current site maintenance takes most of there availability.

!Hubzilla DevelopmentWith the recent informal specialization move of Osada becoming a more social networking directed branch on the Zot family and Hubzilla moving more into the direction of an app platform (unlike its original shape as a shared webring like personal website system), it might make sense to look into actual user-stories and see which functionality would be useful to add as apps.

The past days I didn't work on my game much. (Shame on me! ;) )Instead I spent my time on Isleward a #foss MMORPG completely written in javascript. It can be played in browser or via a native client. IMHO the game does many things right and could be seen as an example for a good foss rpg. The comunity seems to be very friendly as far as I could tell. And... I LOVE the 8bit-ish art style!

Very strange issue here... I use a channel as an RSS feed aggregator and today I noticed that new RSS feeds I add only post as "private" with that little lock symbol, which prevents sharing and also using them as channel source. The old ones work fine as before, so this is rather odd.

Anyone got an idea what could be causing this?

Edit: happened exactly with the 50th added feed. I guess I need to check the service level settings?Edit2: no... it also started doing it on other channels with no feeds added yet. Very odd :(

You'll thank me for this as soon as somebody gets sued for copyright infringement for sharing content from a feed - and losing in court. Contrary to popular opinion, just because a feed is public does not give you any copyright protection if you copy it, even if you preserve the attribution. You can still be found guilty of copyright violation but at least the evidence of your guilt isn't available publicly. This will probably start a rousing debate, but read the copyright law and consult with a lawyer. I've been sued for copyright infringement for sharing a public feed with attribution. The lawyer recommended I settle because he assured me I would lose in court. I read the law. Thanks to the DCMA in America and related legislation elsewhere, service providers can't get sued for allowing this to happen. But you can still get sued for doing it. If you want to make this content public, set it up as a channel source. Do this at your own risk.

Yep. Here in the Philippines a host and a forums administrrtor and its moderators were sued because of some user sharing a link to an article that wrote a negative piece about some rich guy. People were also sued for liking articles in Facebook or resharing it.

Imagine if it is Copyright. Not just that. The main image used by the article is itself a Copyright infringement, you reshare it, that image is the one shown in the reshare. The image rightsholder can sue multiple people if s/he wants to.

There is Fair Use but it is USA only. There similar but not exact concepts in other countries but most doesn't have such. Regardless, Fair Use itself is vague, US courts doesn't give the same ruling on it.

In my blogs, I only pick Copyleft and Public Domain materials. Then I repub those in separate channels. Press Releases and the assets included are fine, those were meant to be published. I even challenged YouTube multiple times for flagging my channels and videos and showed them proof those were provided directly by the owners to be uploaded, not for our private viewing pleasure. Google kept clearing my channels.

This repub and hosting business is very tricky. Even memes. People using Copyrighted materials for memes and resharing it, are opening themselves up for trouble. If someone wants to make an example of someone, they can easily pick 1000 social media accounts and websites randomly, and sue them in their home countries.

I've seen bloggers who experienced this. One was a woman, she was sued by a photographer from another country. She removed all photos after the initial contact but the photographer still sued her just to teach her and everyone a lesson. A Copyright infringement is Copyright infringement. Remove it or not, the "damage" has been done. She almost shutdown her blog because suddenly, she's in deep debts. She is now an advocate of Copyright and Copyleft.

It is a scary world. We are under the laws of the location of our servers, the location of the hosting's HQ or official registration, and the laws of our own home country.

Then we are in a federated network across different locations. What happens in this situation is anyone's guess. Hopefully, no one becomes an example because it will be very, very ugly. Some hosts might be protected, some not. If there's a way to bring a case to a country hosts can get sued, they will do that.

This is why I do read all those hidden FAQs, Legal, Terms, etc. I also keep a list of sources I can safely reuse and reshare and even repub. When it comes to images, I trace back the original source of the image and determine for myself if it is indeed Copyleft or Public Domain.

I avoid anything not Copyleft or Public Domain, and anything that can't be trusted as far as surprise suing is concerned. Our local news outlets are generally safe, here the competition is all about exposure so they really love it when you reshare them (not reuse of course) but still consider the image that will show up in the reshare (they too make mistakes, companies are the usual targets in Copyright infringement cases = money and no conscience you made an individual or non-profit suffer).

(I think we now have a similar DMCA law after those crazy years of targetting hosts and communities but not in, for example, Singapore. I remember a few years ago, admis and moderators of a Facebook group were sued for allowing a member to post something, which they actually kept deleting but the member had too many accounts. It was a very questionable case but their country their laws.)

I've deleted the channels which had no connections other than me. On the others, I'll lost the links to the originals before I delete them so people can opt to follow directly if they like. But, not tonight.

If you want to make this content public, set it up as a channel source. Do this at your own risk.

@Mike MacgirvinYes I am doing that ;) I am not too worried about the copyright aspect as I am carefully selecting the feeds from the open-source/FOSS gaming scene that are 99% sure not going to sue me.

What I find strange though is, how does Hubzilla decide which feed items get a lock and which don't? As I said, I have plenty of feeds where this doesn't happen so it isn't a general "feature" it seems. Does it decide based on some meta data from the RSS feed or how does it happen?

!Hubzilla Support ForumIs it possible to somehow suppress double posts on the public stream if a user on the same server posts to a forum channel? Of course it makes sense to have the post appear both on the users server and the forum channels server, but if they are the same than forum channel could maybe take priority and the user post should be somehow hidden on the public stream?

I have it working here, but it requires some extra steps:1. Create a view in your database to combine the account and the channel tables.SELECT `channel_address`, `channel_name`, `account_password`, `account_salt`, `account_email` FROM `account`, `channel` WHERE `channel_account_id` = `account_id` as the SQL query should do for basic setups2. Install Nextcloud and the user_sql app (until the next official release you will need the develop branch from github)3. Configure user_sql to access the HubZilla database and choose the above parameters for password hash, salt etc. Channel address should be the user name and channel name the full name. The hashing algorithm needs to be "whirlpool" and you need to check the "prepend salt" checkbox.4. Enjoy logging into your nextcloud with your Hubzilla channel name and password (email might also work, but could cause issue if you have multiple channels per account). You can link the CalDAV calendars and also the WebDAV storage via the external storage app in Nextcloud easily.

If you are feeling fancy you can install the JSXC XMPP client Nextcloud app and link an XMPP server like Prosody or Ejabberd to your Nextcloud and Hubzilla via the Xcloudauth software:https://github.com/jsxc/xmpp-cloud-auth

I have not yet tested it, but I believe the auto login feature from the HubZilla XMPP plugin might work this way.

Todo: find a way to have user roles in HubZilla to link them with the groups in Nextcloud :)

!Hubzilla DevelopmentI am looking for a way to have certain user categories and right now the closes seems to be "service class", but that only allows a single one per account I think?

The regular groups feature seems channel specific, so there is no way to use of for having server wide groups/categories.

I am looking at this from the perspective to accessing the HubZilla database from an external service for sharing users, but right now there seems to be no truly comparable concept to user categories in HubZilla. I would like to pass such groups to my Ejabberd XMPP server for populating the shared groups rooster.

I guess this might be also relevant for the upcoming OpenID Connect feature that typically also allows passing "group membership" parameters? @M. Dent

But of course having a concept of "moderators" or "supporters" etc. in HubZilla might be interesting as well, and similar to the existing "service class", just that often you would want a user to be a member of more than one group...

Has anyone looked into this before or might this be an upcoming feature?

There is the ability for Hubzilla to utilize an LDAP directory. I think if I were looking to do what you are describing, I would look in that direction rather than putting Hubzilla authentication at the center.

Yeah, however in my specific case I can't use LDAP for various reasons (server limitations and not wanting to have cross server accessible LDAP as it isn't meant for such uses). But once server wide OpenIDConnect is available then it would also make a lot of sense to not use LDAP and simply deploy HubZilla as the central user-database?

Looking at the code and the database there seems to be something called "account_roles" that is so far only used for Admin ("4096") and regular users ("0")? Could that be expanded to allow custom roles?

!Hubzilla Support ForumI noticed that when I delete accounts and channels these do not get fully removed. For cloned channels "ghosts" remain in the connections page and when I manually look into the database you can see that all accounts and channels remain, but just get flagged as deleted.

Is there a way to fully purge these entries, or at least overwrite them with data, so that the user data is truly removed? Otherwise I also see issues with GDPR compliance...

As I recall, things do get deleted after some time (30 days I think). To delete them immediately would be problematic because of the way messages and data are propagated through the network. There is a need to keep the data for a time (flagged as deleted) or "ghosted" as you say, to make sure it doesn't get fully resurrected.

Disroot.org is a platform providing multiple services for many different use cases. Most of the services offered on the platform already provide their own mobile app but that is ungraspable to the many people who were constantly inquiring about a "Disroot app". Time and time again we've been explaining people that they can use any email app supporting IMAP/POP3 or that they can just grab nextcloud app to sync files or use any Jabber client for their chat. But now, thanks to a very clever Disrooter, we actualy have a Disroot app, something we, the admins, couldn't even imagine! the Disapp works as a swiss army knife for Disroot. It helps users install appropriate apps for each service, as well as open Disroot related URL's within the app window for those services that don't have a dedicated application. Its a very neat aproach that solves a lot of problems for new comers as well as veteran users. We are very excited and very thankful for @Massimiliano as well as all the people in the community that have helped making it happen.

Nomad.As some of you know for last months we are experimenting with an amazing social network called Hubzilla. Together with other disrooters we are working on the documentation, theme, plugins and few other things that will make our instance a complete package easy to onboard and use. Yet again, with pure caffeine running through his veins, the sleepless Disrooter decided to take on the task of creating dedicated app for hubzilla called Nomad. Nomad, created by @Massimiliano , is a fork of #{massimiliano@hub.disroot.org} (mobile app for diaspora) which serves a webview version of hubzilla with extra features such as native menus, share with, and other neat things you expect from the mobile app. It's still in early stages of development and needs a lot fo work but its very much awesome already and makes hubzilla usage on mobile a breeze.

We are very excited about those two new apps and would like to thank all the people that were involved in the process of creating them, testing and translating.

you can find both apps on fdroid if you don't use that app store yet, its about time to start:disrootappnomad